Happy Birthday to my blog

Happy birthday to my blog. With this post, I have 365 published blog posts on YukonJen since 2005. I’m not sure what that says about me as a blogger (one blog-year equals four person-years maybe?). But I am extremely pleased as a writer. I’ve always wanted to be a writer. Throughout my life, I’ve always started writing projects and let them fall by the wayside. This blog is the first writing project that I’ve started and I’ve kept up (through multiple, multiple changes in my life). I love this blog. I am Jen. And Jen I be. Blogging is my therapy. 

I thought I’d publish a few interesting stats.  

I wrote my first post on 09 April 2005. It had seven words.

I think my longest post is the one I wrote on hiking the Chilkoot Trail with my sister and my niece in 2005. We did it over four days just before my parent’s 40th wedding anniversary. 

My most active posting months seems to be a tie between April 2005,  April 2008 and November 2009. 13 posts for each of those months. I am sooooo motivated to break that record though. Now I know why statistics are so important!

My least active months are March 2006 and July 2009.

My most viewed blog entry: My life-saving butt.

My most viewed blog category: All about my butt.

My personal favourite blog entry is my entry on the perils of using hand sanitizer (an entry in the All about my butt category). 

I have readers in 33 different countries (they don’t always comment, but I know they are out there). Some of them are new visitors (usually finding the butt blog). I like the 50% or more who are returning visitors though. 

Thematic is the fourth WordPress theme I have used on my blog. I started with the plain vanilla and WordPress 1.2. I had IMJTK design my first custom theme for me. I don’t have any screenshots of that, but I did like the rotating quotes at the top of the page. Last year, I found this crazy, flashy, Notepad Chaos, a free theme from Evan Eckard over at Smashing Magazine and I liked that for a long time. 

This year, I’m starting with plain white. A blank canvas. I’m going to decorate it as I go along. 

In the life of my blog, I’ve worked at Turin Networks (now Force10), Bush-Field Estate Vineyards and Winery, Dilithium Networks, and Intuit. I started two vacation rentals: HealdsburgBungalow.com and FitchMountainLookout.com. I’ve started a number of my own websites and helped a number of other people start theirs. I am finally consolidating all of my helping into a personal consulting business: 9068Creative.com (am still working to launch that site though). Still, I keep coming back to YukonJen. 

In the life of my blog, both Facebook and Twitter were born. WordPress graduated to a dynamic web-publishing platform. Social media exploded. Online communities exploded. (At a seminar I attended the other day, I heard that Fortune 500 companies are paying $200/hr for people with my skills.)

All I can say is bring it on 2010. Bring it on.